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MC Michael Corin On Marketplace (APM)

“About 15% of the cars now being sold in Mexico are actually Chinese brands. And Chinese brands have about a 90% share of the EVs in the country. And so Americans are just not really making the cars that Mexicans are buying in terms of electric vehicles and even increasingly just conventional vehicles.”

Marketplace (APM) · Money & Markets · October 2026

“About 15% of the cars now being sold in Mexico are actually Chinese brands. And Chinese brands have about a 90% share of the EVs in the country. And so Americans are just not really making the cars that Mexicans are buying in terms of electric vehicles and even increasingly just conventional vehicles.” — Michael Corin, Marketplace (APM)

Context

Corin, a Washington Post columnist, went to Mexico to test-drive Chinese EVs that can't be bought in the US. Asked how American makers are doing against the Chinese there, he gives market-share figures, treating Mexico as a natural experiment in head-to-head competition.

Transcript

Marketplace (APM) Around 20:00 into the episode
Speaker 2

…still a lot of American and European cars. And when I have stamped on a street corner and I watch them go by, I would count them. And, you know, within about five or 10 minutes, I would see five, 10, 15 or more Chinese vehicles. But every year, That's getting much larger. And so Mexico is really

Kai Ryssdal

this sort of natural experiment about what happens when Chinese EVs go head-to-head with American cars. Spoiler alert, I suppose, is warranted here, but how are Americans doing against the Chinese in the electric car market? Well, you know, we have some great cars from the past,

Speaker 2

but I wasn't seeing a lot from the future. About 15% of the cars now being sold in Mexico are actually Chinese brands. And Chinese brands have about a 90% share of the EVs in the country. And so Americans are just not really making the cars that Mexicans are buying in terms of electric vehicles and even increasingly just conventional vehicles.

Kai Ryssdal

Let's talk qualitative here. You drove a bunch of them. Generally speaking, what'd you think?

Speaker 2

So what's fascinating is that there are Chinese vehicles at every price point

Kai Ryssdal

from the very lowest, around $20,000, almost all the way up. And what I think they are selling is affordable luxury. So even at the lowest price point, you're getting sort of features and quality that you really don't see at cars that might cost a third more, or sometimes twice as much. And so…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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